[here is an excerpt from the opening of Lorca's "Ode to Salvador Dali," written summer of 1925-March 1926, and published in Revista de Occidente, Madrid, April 1926]

A rose in the high garden you desire.
A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.
The mountain stripped bare of Impressionist fog.
The grays watching over the last balustrades.

The modern painters in their white atliers
clip the square root's sterilized flower.
In the waters of the Seine a marble iceberg
chills the windows and scatters the ivy.

Man treads firmly on the cobbled streets.
Crystals hide from the magic of reflections.
The Government has closed the perfume stores.
The machine perpetuates its binary beat.

An absence of forests and screens and brows
roams across the roofs of the old houses.
The air polishes its prism on the sea
and the horizon rises like a great aquaduct.

Soldiers who know no wine and no penumbra
behead the sirens on the seas of lead.
Night, black statue of prudence, holds
the moon's round mirror in her hand.

A desire for forms and limits overwhelms us.
Here comes the man who sees with a yellow ruler.
Venus is a white still life
and the butterfly collectors run away.

(287, 289)

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Note: Thirty years later, after Dali's renown is well established and his approaches have both a traceable history and what is assumed as an evolving signature, as well as a continuous, critical discourse framing and traversing the art, the following is Frank O'Hara commenting in Art News, Jan. 1955 on Dali's showing at Carstairs Gallery. ** --cm

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O'Hara:

Salvador Dali [Carstairs], the Marshall Rommel of Surrealism, prefaces his new show with an account of his recent "campaign" in Europe, where he finds the forces of figuration rallying everywhere against abstraction, hungry hordes presumably infuriated by the "Let them eat cake" of Riopelle. Are they turning to Surrealism? Dali himself is less of a Surrealist than before, more the metaphysical dream peddler, the comological dandy, the mathematical speculator whose terms are romantic ruins, wood, and women. His incessant preoccupation with time as an element of space, ticking from the surface into the perspective depths and back like a pendulum, is strangely moving; the famous "limp watches" are shattering into fragments in the same landscape that gave them birth; the artist himself, nude, conducts you into a beautiful candy-dream where your faithful dog is asleep at your feet and the woods and the vastly impressive passivity of megalomania, but it is not exactly a revolutionary's dream. He calls forth the minor or repressed admirations, sexual, tactile, sybaritic, technical--the subject is no longer of paranoiac importance--and makes a monument.